I came across a two word combi nation the other day that caught my attention – meeting sickness. Originally coined by Dutch workers, meeting sickness refers to the unnecessary calling of meetings by managers and the loss of productivity that long, boring and creativity crush ing meetings foster. The Dutch seem to be in the forefront of revolting against meeting sickness, although corporate practices are hard to break.

We already know from volumes of studies that along with meeting sick ness, email is also a major culprit in limiting productivity. Email devours 25 percent of workers’ time as they create an office culture where it’s dif ficult to hit the delete button and easy to fall into the trap of replying to all. There is a real price to pay because of email overload. US businesses lose an estimated $ 650 billion in productivity a year as workers are unwilling to ig nore an avalanche of email.

Just like the Dutch complaining about meeting sickness, others in Eu rope seem to be taking steps to re spond to email overload. One French technology firm, Atos, has taken the unusual step of banning internal email. According to a story in OnlineITDe gree.net, the CEO of Atos, Thierry Breton, has said that only 10 percent of the average 200 individual email his employees receive each day are “use ful,” which of course means that the rest of the email is “useless.”

When Dutch workers demean office conferences by using the derogatory term meeting sickness and French firms like Atos ban email, one must wonder what steps Americans are tak ing to ease their burdens, other than wearing jeans on Fridays? Well the an swer is not much, at least not in the trenches of the corporate world. Work ers and most bosses here in the US seem to believe that meetings and email somehow enhance creativity and productivity. There is scant proof for their belief, but the myths continue.

Instead of responding to meeting sickness and email overload what many Americans do is criticize the Europeans for abiding by what Har vard historian Niall Ferguson calls an “atheist sloth ethic” when they should be embracing our hard driving Puritan work ethic. The plight of overworked Americans gets even more difficult when vacation time is factored in.

Most of us accept the two week vacation as a great benefit, cling to our smart phones on weekends and deride the overtaxed and nanny states of Eu rope for allowing its workers to relax a bit both on and off the job. By the way, Germany, which mandates six weeks paid vacation, has an unem ployment rate a point lower than the US and one of the highest productivity levels in the European Union.

There are some signs that at the top of the corporate ladder here in the US executives are aware that getting stuck in a culture of meeting sickness and email overload can be a creativity and productivity killer. Bill Gates, for ex ample, heads to his cabin in the woods to clear his mind and develop new ideas and former GE head, Jack Welch took pride in describing what he called “looking out the window time.”

Page 2 of 2 - What Gates and Welch are admit ting by their practices is that workers need time to be creative and produc tive, away from the mundane tasks of responding to emails and sitting in endless meetings. Not surprisingly, most bosses cringe at the site of one of their employees daydreaming in his or her cubicle or using the delete button when they should be playing along with the email game and sitting atten tively at the morning staff meeting.

It would seem that the time has come in this country to have a serious discussion about how best to be cre ative and productive while on the job. Is holding on to the drudgery of re sponding to hundreds of email and fighting the desire to doze at late after noon meetings the best way to foster a positive corporate culture or can we learn from the Europeans, who at least are beginning to recognize that the way an office operates needs to change?

Perhaps we should give an award to the person who invented the delete button.